Stephen Colbert arrives for The Hollywood Reporter's The Most Powerful People in Media, in New York, U.S., May 7, 2026. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
President Donald Trump cheered the death of "The Late Show" in the early morning hours of Friday after Stephen Colbert closed out the 33-year run of the show crafted by comedian David Letterman in 1993.
For the past 11 years, Colbert has been at the helm of the show, and has enjoyed top ratings for late-night every season from 2016 until Thursday night.
Trump ally and funder David Ellison and his father Larry Ellison merged "Skydance Media" with CBS Paramount and immediately began making cuts to the news division and announced the end of the popular late-night program that the president has spent years attacking.
CNN media analyst Brian Stelter told Wolf Blitzer that he expects Kimmel to get a bump of viewership in the absence of Colbert.
"But competition has historically made late-night better. It makes these shows funnier and more interesting. So, this is a bleak moment for the late-night TV industry at large," Stelter said.
He explained that it's ultimately an advertising problem as viewership shifts from network television to streaming media. "The Late Show" boasted 2.7 to 2.8 million viewers per night. In his final week, Colbert scored higher ratings than Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon combined, the LateNighter reported. But on YouTube, Colbert enjoys over 10.7 million subscribers. Still, the network claims that the ultimate cost to put on "The Late Show" wasn't worth the profits. It claimed it was losing $40 million, the New York Times reported.
At 1:52 a.m. EST, Trump posted, "Colbert is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person," Trump said, though he didn't explain how. "You could take any person off the street and they would be better than this total jerk. Thank goodness he's finally gone!"
"That's the president cheering the loss of American jobs," said Stelter. "About 200 staffers will be out of work. Now that 'The Late Show' lights have been turned off."
If Trump thinks that he managed to silence Colbert, Stelter explained that it isn't entirely the case.
"Analysts believe Stephen Colbert will have no shortage of options if he wants to set up shop and start a new show somewhere else," he said.
Colbert welcomed fellow late-night hosts to the show this week, where they poked fun at each other and discussed the future of late-night. On hand was Jimmy Kimmel, who had his own run-ins with Trump and was nearly canceled. He was brought back days later after an uprising so huge that parent company Disney panicked as millions canceled their Disney+ subscriptions.
"I will tell you, when I got knocked off the air for a few days, people canceled Disney+. Why aren’t people canceling Paramount+? Because you never had it in the first place?” Kimmel mocked the CBS network overlords.
Paramount+ continues to lose subscribers each quarter, according to Media Play News. They boast over 77 million subscribers. By contrast, Netflix has 325 million paid subscribers and Disney+ has approximately 131.6 million subscribers.
Since taking over, the Ellisons have overseen the continued decline in CBS News' ratings. The family now has its eyes on buying the media giant Time Warner. The conservative slant of the family leads critics to expect they will turn CNN into another far-right news network to split aging conservative demographics who watch Fox News, OAN and Newsmax.